Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel (3rd, Q3 - 1m 46.905s)
“It’s hard to say what happened. I was happy until the end of Q2, but then in Q3 we weren’t able to go with the track and improve. In Q3 I couldn’t feel the grip so well and convert it to the lap time. The most important day is tomorrow and we have got pace in the car. We have been competitive this weekend and our target is to have a good race tomorrow; P3 is still a good place to start from.”

Mark Webber (7th, Q3 - 1m 47.475s)
“We expected to be higher than that. It was a tricky session and on every run the car felt a bit different. We didn’t have the rear-grip that we had in the other sessions; normally the super soft tyres give us a certain balance, but it was difficult to chase it in that session. It’s disappointing to be seventh, but it’s a long race tomorrow and we have a chance to get something from it.”

Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal
“After being competitive in FP1, 2 and 3, third and seventh is a strong result here, but perhaps not as strong as we would have hoped for. Our rhythm in Q3 seemed to be slightly interrupted, but it’s still close and it’s a long and hot race tomorrow. I’m sure we can race well from third and seventh on the grid.”

Cyril Dumont, Renault support for Red Bull
“It was surprise today; we were expecting to be higher than P3 and P7 looking at our pace in the previous sessions. I think tomorrow will be long, but there are many corners, so we will try to regain our pace and see what we can do from there.”

Lotus

Kimi Raikkonen (12th, Q2 - 1m 48.261s)
“The car was much better overall today than it was yesterday. We were quick with the used tyres but for some reason struggled for grip with the new ones in the second session and we were actually slightly slower. For sure P12 is not the position we wanted; we don’t seem to have the speed to challenge the leaders here but the car is definitely quicker than that. We’ll see what we can do in the race.”

Romain Grosjean (8th, Q3 - 1m 47.788s)
“The result is not as good as we wanted, but this is a very hard track to get right and we’ve been struggling for ultimate grip throughout this weekend so far, so overall it was good to be in Q3. After Q1 and Q2 we felt positive but it didn’t quite come together in the final session. I pushed a little bit too hard on my last lap; it felt good in the car, but it wasn’t good for my lap time and there was one moment where I lost most quite a lot of time. It was pretty close but I don’t think I touched the wall; I’ll have to check to see if the Pirelli tyre markings are still there!”

Alan Permane, Lotus trackside operations director
“We’re disappointed with qualifying as we were hoping for a lot better than we achieved. We improved the car dramatically overnight and through today’s practice session. Romain was two tenths slower in Q3 than he had been in Q2, but we could all see where most of that time was lost on his lap. Kimi was slower on a fresh set of tyres than he was on a scrubbed set, but it’s not immediately apparent why this was the case. He looked in excellent shape with his scrubbed run. We found a much better setup in our analysis overnight and we continued in that direction through FP3, steadily improving the car with a further step made going into qualifying. Both drivers were pretty happy with the car at the end of practice today. The super soft compound is a lot faster than the soft tyre and it will need a big difference in degradation for the soft to be the preferred option in the race.”